January 2, 2014

Top 10 Most Pirated Films Of 2013 – Hobbit Finishes Top Of The List

The most pirated movie of 2013 might be a bit unexpected. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was the most pirated movie of 2013, with an estimated 8.4 million downloads. That's according to a list of the top 10 pirated movies released by TorrentFreak.

Coming in behind the Peter Jackson-directed tale from Middle Earth is Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, followed by The Fast and Furious 6. The top-grossing film on the list is Iron Man 3, which came in fourth place. The comic book-made-movie franchise Iron Man 3 grossed $1.2 billion in box offices compared to The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which pulled in $1 billion. None of the other movies on the top ten pirated movie list broke a billion in worldwide box offices.

The numbers are based on downloads, and several factors keep the numbers of illegal views from being truly accurate. For instance, the use of services such as cyberlocker and online streaming are not counted, TorrentFreak notes.

Notable films that didn't make the list include The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Man of Steel. TorrentFreak lists Gangster Squad as a notable mention. The movie placed seventh on the list with 7.2 million downloads. The movie grossed just $105 million, which is the lowest worldwide box office figure on the list.

"'Journey,' which opened Dec. 14, 2012, and raked in more than $1 billion worldwide, was pirated a whopping 8.4 million times throughout the year via BitTorrent networks. Even in light of the movie's impressive box-office tallies, that figure is cringeworthy when compared to the additional revenue 'Journey' could have made, had those illegal downloads come in the form of ticket and DVD sales," The Huffington Post's Matthew Jacobs writes.

Measures to block illegal downloads include court orders for Internet service providers to block access to sites such as the file-sharing site The Pirate Bay, which hosts links to download pirated content, BBC News reports. Court orders and other actions have caused The Pirate Bay to change its domain six times. Yet in the past year, the site has experienced an increase in uploads of 50 percent, with 2.8 million files now being listed.

The complete Top 10:

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (8.4 million)

Django Unchained (8.1 million)

Fast & Furious 6 (7.9 million)

Iron Man 3 (7.6 million)

Silver Linings Playbook (7.5 million)

Star Trek Into Darkness (7.4 million)

Gangster Squad (7.2 million)

Now You See Me (7 million)

The Hangover Part III (6.9 million)

World War Z (6.7 million)

TorrentFreak's top pirated movies list follows its release of the most pirated TV shows of 2013. Among the list, Game of Thrones took the crown with an estimated 5.9 million downloads. The number of downloads tops the estimated 5.5 million US viewers. However, the pirated download list is a worldwide number. Coming in second was Breaking Bad with 4.2 million downloads, and in third was The Walking Dead with 3.6 million downloads. Also on the list were The Big Bang Theory (3.4 million), Dexter (3.1 million), How I Met Your Mother (3 million),; Suits (2.6 million), Homeland (2.4 million), Vikings (2.3 million) and Arrow (2.2 million).